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2 Copyright 2010 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published November, 2010 EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. EMC Corporation does not warrant or represent that a user can or will achieve similar performance expressed in transactions per minute. No warranty of system performance or price/performance is expressed or implied in this document. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Part number: h

4 Reference architecture overview Document purpose EMC's commitment to consistently maintain and improve quality is led by the Total Customer Experience (TCE) program, which is driven by Six Sigma methodologies. As a result, EMC has built Customer Integration Labs in its Global Solutions Centers to reflect realworld deployments in which TCE use cases are developed and executed. These use cases provide EMC with an insight into the challenges currently facing its customers. This document describes the reference architecture of the EMC Unified Storage for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 BLOB Externalization Enabled by EMC Celerra and Metalogix StoragePoint solution, which was tested and validated by EMC Information Infrastructure Solutions. Solution purpose The purpose of this reference architecture is to demonstrate how to use EMC s expertise and proven technologies to externalize and manage binary large objects (BLOBs) in the SharePoint farm. The purpose of this solution is to: Design a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment with external BLOB storage on an EMC Celerra file system. Realize space-saving benefits in the SharePoint farm content databases as a result of external BLOB storage. Backup and restore SharePoint databases and the BLOB store by using EMC Celerra SnapSure and EMC Celerra Replicator technologies through EMC Replication Manager. This reference architecture is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to every aspect of the solution, but only to offer an overview of the architecture and discuss the benefits of deploying an external BLOB storage solution by using Celerra unified storage systems. The business challenge SharePoint 2010 facilitates collaboration, provides content management features, and implements business processes. It provides an integrated platform to plan, deploy, and manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across and beyond the enterprise. SharePoint uses multiple servers in various roles to organize and deliver website collaboration and information sharing across organizations. In a typical enterprise deployment of SharePoint Server, a large proportion of data is stored as unstructured, binary data streams (or BLOBs) associated with SharePoint files. However, SQL Server is not the best option to store unstructured binary data streams because relational databases are designed to handle structured relational data. Moreover, as SharePoint is heavily document-centric with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF, Microsoft PowerPoint, and other files, SQL databases can grow exceptionally large due to the BLOBs, and thus significantly affect the performance of SharePoint. Therefore, with SQL databases as the BLOB store, administrators cannot easily and economically implement SharePoint for medium-scale to large-scale content or document management scenarios. To summarize, BLOBs stored in SQL Server creates issues related to performance, 4

5 scalability, and implementation costs. The technology solution This solution demonstrates how to use an EMC Celerra unified storage platform to store external BLOBs for a SharePoint 2010 environment. In this solution, Metalogix StoragePoint externalizes the SharePoint documents from SQL Server to a file system on Celerra. Replication Manager is used to create local replicas and snapshots to protect the SharePoint databases and the Celerra file system, which is used as the external BLOB store. Solution benefits The benefits of this solution are as follows: External BLOB storage frees database resources: Storing BLOBs in file systems outside the SQL database frees valuable space, and thus reduces the cost of tier 1 storage space. A 92.8 percent reduction in space was observed in the SQL content database disk usage report. File system storage introduces features such as deduplication: With SharePoint documents in dedicated file systems, advanced features of the Celerra unified storage system can be used to get additional storage cost savings. With an average BLOB size of 220 KB, a minimum of 18 percent space savings was observed in the environment. One platform to store and back up the SharePoint databases and BLOB store file systems: Replication Manager creates consistent local replicas and snapshots of SQL databases and the Celerra file system, and thus simplifies the protection of SharePoint databases and BLOB stores. StoragePoint provides features such as compression and encryption: External BLOBs can be compressed to save space and can be encrypted for added security. 5

8 BLOB store on SATA disks configuration Storage layout overview The Celerra storage array stores the following: SharePoint Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK) files, index files, databases, logs, and tempdb BLOBs offloaded from SQL databases to the BLOB store file system that is accessed through the Common Internet File System (CIFS) share Snapshots and replicas of SharePoint databases and the BLOB store file system SharePoint VMDK and index files: A RAID 5 (4+1) group of spindles stores the system volumes, SharePoint VMDK files, and index files. SharePoint logs and tempdb: The configuration tested in this solution uses RAID 1 (1+1) groups to store the tempdb and log files. SharePoint databases and the BLOB store file system: The validated solution uses three storage configurations to study the SharePoint performance with and without the externalization of BLOBs on the RAID 5 (4+1) configuration of FC and SATA disks. The following table describes the three storage configurations. Storage configuration Databases on BLOB store on Baseline 2 RAID 5 (4+1) FC disks Not applicable BLOB store on FC disks RAID 5 (4+1) FC disks RAID 5 (4+1) FC disks 8

9 BLOB store on SATA disks RAID 5 (4+1) FC disks RAID 5 (4+1) SATA disks Snapshots and replicas of SharePoint databases and the BLOB store: A RAID 5 (4+1) group of FC spindles stores the snapshots and replicas of SharePoint databases and logs. A RAID 5 (4+1) group of SATA or FC spindles stores the snapshots and replicas of the BLOB store file system. 9

10 Key components Introduction This section briefly describes the following key components of the SharePoint 2010 BLOB externalization solution: EMC Celerra unified storage platform Metalogix StoragePoint EMC Replication Manager The Hardware and software resources section provides details on all the components that make up the reference architecture. EMC Celerra unified storage platform The EMC Celerra unified storage platform is a dedicated network server optimized for file and block access, delivering high-end features in a scalable and easy-to-use package. For high scalability, Celerra unified storage platforms use both the innovative EMC CLARiiON Fibre Channel RAID storage, delivering best-in-class availability and data protection, and the availability, performance, and ease of management of EMC Celerra. Celerra unified storage systems deliver a single-box block and file solution offering a centralized point of management for distributed environments. This makes it possible to dynamically grow, share, and cost-effectively manage multiprotocol file systems and provide multiprotocol block access. Administrators can take advantage of simultaneous support for network file system (NFS) and CIFS protocols by enabling Windows and Linux/UNIX clients to share files using the Celerra system s sophisticated file-locking mechanisms and by using SCSI or FC for high-bandwidth or latency-sensitive applications. The Celerra unified storage platform provides native CLARiiON value-added functionalities such as EMC MirrorView /Synchronous, EMC MirrorView/ Asynchronous, EMC SnapView, and clones. Metalogix StoragePoint Metalogix StoragePoint is software that uses External BLOB Storage (EBS) and Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) provider application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable organizations to seamlessly move BLOB content when it ages, becomes less relevant, or inactive from SQL content databases to lower-cost tiers of storage based on simple-to-configure rules. Customers can use multiple tiers of storage consisting of virtually any mix of network-attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN), and cloud storage platforms, and thus use the most appropriate storage based on performance, compliance, or budgetary requirements. When StoragePoint is installed, it is integrated with the SharePoint Central Administration. StoragePoint also optimizes SharePoint manageability, scalability, and security without affecting the functionality, performance, or end-user experience. EMC Replication Manager EMC Replication Manager is software that automates and simplifies the management of disk-based replicas. It orchestrates critical business applications, middleware, and underlying EMC replication technologies to create and manage replicas at the application level for a variety of purposes, including operational recovery, backup, restore, development, simulation, and repurposing. Replication Manager also helps customers safeguard their business-critical 10

11 applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, by using either point-in-time disk-based replicas or continuous data protection sets that can be restored to any significant point in time. Also, Replication Manager has deep application integration with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. Replicas are created by coordinating with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to ensure a complete copy of SQL databases (even active databases) without disturbing the production SQL environment. In Celerra environments, Replication Manager controls the creation of snapshots, marks the snapshots for replication, and initiates the copy job from the source to the destination. It uses the EMC Celerra Replicator software for replications to a local or remote iscsi Celerra. 11

12 Validated environment profile Profile characteristics The solution was validated with the following environment profile. Profile characteristic Value SharePoint farm user data 1.03 TB Concurrency 10% Enterprise portal collaboration site collections 1 Document library sites 10 Number of documents in the SharePoint farm 4,359,346 Size of content index files on the SharePoint application server GB Web front-end server (virtual machine) 1 SharePoint application server (virtual machine) 1 SQL Server 2008 R2 (virtual machine) 1 Farm user load profiles A typical Microsoft user load profile was used to determine the maximum user count that the SharePoint farm can sustain while ensuring that the average response time remained within the acceptable user limits. As per the Microsoft standard, a typical user performs 36 requests per hour (RPH). The following table lists the acceptable user limits for SharePoint operations. Type of operation Example Acceptable user response time Common Browse < 3 seconds Common Search < 3 seconds Uncommon Modify < 5 seconds The user profiles were tested against the three storage configurations. The following table lists the requests per second (RPS) values that were obtained. This is the SharePoint farm throughput for the three storage configurations. NOTE The maximum user capacity is derived from the following formula: User capacity = Seconds per hour/rph/concurrency RPS Example: 3600/36/10% 5.35 = 5,350 typical users 12

15 Conclusion Summary This reference architecture depicts a validated solution that externalizes SharePoint BLOB data to a Celerra unified storage platform by using Metalogix StoragePoint and uses array-based functionalities such as tiering, archiving, deduplication, and file-level retention. This solution decreases the size of tier 1 storage, which is used for SharePoint databases, without performance degradation and subsequently reduces maintenance windows. Backup and restore windows are also reduced by using Celerra SnapSure and Celerra Replicator functionalities. Next steps EMC can help accelerate assessment, design, implementation, and management, while lowering the implementation risks and costs of a solution for a SharePoint 2010 environment. To learn more about this and other solutions, contact an EMC representative. 15

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